For a long time now I have wanted to write a tutorial about buying art
commissions from artists on the internet.

The images here are from an upcoming game about Pirates, Space Pirates!

Eventually I began working with a Hungarian Artist on the Galaxy Pirates RPG
project.

Sketches and Artist's renderings by Tamas Baranya, I asked Tomi if I could
show some of the Work In Progress stuff to give people a behind the scenes view
of the process and he agreed.

The pieces below are for the creatures part of the game, Sentient Robot
enemies are going to be a big part of the game. So we start off with a
relatively simple Robot concept, its 12 feet tall strong and destructive, I
call these robots the Destroyers.

Initially Tomi gave me the sketch below. It's a little bit Transformers and
the head reminded me a little bit of the Giant Wrestling Robot from Futurama.
The Wheel looking structures are supposed to be points of articulation and not
places where the robot will transform into a Car or something.

I asked Tomi to soften the head spikes a little bit and he did. This one
almost looks too happy for a Death and Destruction robot. Especially something
called a Destroyer, but we kept it anyway.

I worked on some other robots and creatures with Tomi before we came back to
this series. I really wanted something that screamed Death, I remembered the
old Frank Frazetta Death Dealer character and figured that couldn't be mistaken
for something else. So I asked Tomi for a little something more Frazetta.

Well the Horns make it pretty unmistakable, the claws are a lot more robot
and less gauntlet like, the rounded articulation in the joints is still there,
but no wheels in the cheat that made the first one look like Bumblebee. The
legs however, just seem puny compared to the arms, and the shoulderpads are
really almost cartoonish. I asked Tomi to make the legs longer and more
proportional, and so it goes.

The legs are more proportional, the arms and claws are still a little
oversized but that's actually part of the design, the robot isn't going to
carry a giant battle axe and its supposed to shoot Death Rays out of the center
of the claws, you should see the nozzles pretty clearly. So we run with the
current setup and get the final image below.

Okay so the robots want to destroy all Humanity, actually Organic life in
general and the Death's Head/Death Ray model pretty much sums it up, but I want
variety, so I go back to Tomi and I ask him for something a little more primal.
I ask for a robot with a raging fire in its heart, something that shoots plasma
out of its claws and heat just radiates out of its armor and there's an
internal glow that just comes from the openings in its armor. I also told him
to stick with the Chest Armor of the Death's Head model so it would at least
look a little like they came from the same place, to give us design elements
that tied the different models together. This is the sketch I got back.

The arms and Legs are in good proportion, the claws and shoulderpads aren't
oversized and it has a lot of the same design elements. Up to this point all of
the Destroyers had been Black and White, Tomi tried to bring out the fire motif
with the spark like highlights on the armor, but you couldn't really do what we
wanted to show the fire trying to shine through so we went color on this
one.

I think the heat coming through around the top of the shoulders and hips is
probably the best expression of what I was going for. To a lesser extent the
Elbow joints have the same feel, but the knees don't have any of it. Looking
back on it some inner glow inside of the claws might make sense as well. I was
happy with it, I was trying to flesh out new concepts and so didn't really know
what to expect.

Later on at Gen Con Jason Bulmahn was talking about the upcoming Mythic
rules for Pathfinder and there was some kind of Fire/Lava creature that was
surrounded by a cloud of volcanic ash as it walked, anyone approaching the
creature would be choked by the ash and have trouble seeing. I've since looked
into fantasy Fire/Lava creatures especially Kronos from Wrath of the Titans, a
giant made entirely of lava. The lava seethes with an inner fire that's really
close to what I was looking for, but of course we want scifi so a hot iron kind
of look most likely. At this point he biggest criticism of the Destroyers is
some of them look like guys in suits of armor. This applies to the first 4, or
First Generation or series of destroyers, we try really hard to fix that in Gen
2 as you will see.

Anyways we go to to two more Destroyers in this series Electricity and Cold,
I'm sticking with Elementals, this kind of reflects the roots of a lot of
monsters in Role Playing games coming from Fantasy games where the elements and
magic predominate. So Electricity has different Pauldrons, Kneepads and
Facemask. It also has four eyes and two antenna making it a little different
from the 3 Camera Lens arrangement of the Plasma Destroyer above.

The detailing is reminiscent of Lightning Bolts and this destroyer is
supposed to be faster on its feet than the previous 2-3 which were all
lumbering brutes, this one is supposed to have more speed and it is thinner and
the claw hands have seen their first real redesign and look a little like the
first Destroyer we started out with. I approve the sketch and Tomi gives me
something with finished lines.

I approve that and we decide to go away from the harsh metal colors of the
previous robots, this one again calls back to the first destroyer with an alloy
kind of look. And some blue flourishes, I still wonder if we should have made
all the pinstriping blue. The gold works for this model and I think stainless
steel and blue would have not looked as nice.

We did explore more blue with the cold model, I was kind of looking for a
Batman Mr. Freeze look here, this was the first sketch. I really like the light
white holes in the Pauldrons, it ties some of the design elements of the chest,
hips and elbow joints together. Facemask is different, Chestplate and Kneepads
are mostly the same, the Claws return to the Brute model. Pauldrons are nicely
differentiated as I mentioned but all the Destroyer design queues are still
there.

Unfortunately the Pauldrons, Hips and Elbow joints were all colored in AND
approved by me before I really went back and decided how much I liked them in a
different color as a design choice. We tried really hard to come up with some
kind of icicle theme for the pinstriping that would imply cold, but it looks
more like circuitry which might have been a better choice for the Electric
Destroyer.

All in all I like my Destroyers, I even tried them out on some of the
geekiest Robot guys I know, the response from the Mekton Zeta Mailing List was
largely positive though some folks couldn't stand the Horned Helmet on the
Death model. The feedback that they looked like guys in suits of armor
persisted though and I needed to do something about that.

So breakdown of the Robot Drawings, all of them had concepts in mind, none
of them had a specific publishable project in mind. I have since decided that
all of the Destroyers could go into a game supplement which could be used in
Galaxy Pirates or by people playing Pathfinder as the robots are largely
similar to Golems or Clockwork Constructs from fantasy as far as gameplay goes,
and who couldn't use 4 new constructs their players haven't seen yet.

-The final images were done in full color, a lot of the effects we used
wouldn't have come through in Black and White and we would have had to redesign
the color scheme to make them work in B/W. For instance the Cold robot would
have had obvious Icicle motifs, the Plasma one would have had obvious flames
more at home on a Hot Rod than a monster, and the Electric model would have had
more obvious lightning bolts and maybe some static electricity whirling around
him. That is not to say it could not have been done, but we used color in a way
that would be lost in grayscale, if you know upfront you are going to be going
to print in black and white you must design accordingly.

-Eventually I came up with a project, I could try to compare it to other
monster supplements for pricing and sales information which means I might know
how much money I might make back on it.

I hope this helps some of you out there looking to buy pieces for yourself
or for your own RPG projects.